Jean Eells, Mildred Crim, & Helen Bergman

Jean
Eells, her mother, Mildred Crim, and her aunt, Helen Bergman, carry on a
multi-generation family lefse-making tradition in central Iowa. Eells, who
remembers childhood Christmas lefse-making sessions at her paternal aunt
Ruby’s, is deeply committed to passing this skill onto her cousins
and their children.

Mildred Erickson Crim’s grandparents came to Iowa from Sweden in
the 1880s. They purchased land near Stanhope near what used to be called
Clear Lake and hired other Swedes to work for them. Mildred, who attended
Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls (now UNI), taught school for
seven years. Her sister-in-law to be, Helen, was also a teacher. Mildred
and Charles Crim married in 1944 and moved to Stratford, where they lived
with Charles’s parents on the family farm. The Crim family was of
Norwegian and German background. They belonged to a local Methodist church,
since there was no nearby Lutheran church.

According to Mildred and Helen, food traditions revealed the real differences
between the two families’ Norwegian and Swedish cultures. Mildred
remembered that her family made a great many Swedish dishes such as ostakaka
(milk custard), lutefisk (which she never liked), and smorregrot (a cream
and butter spread). She learned to make Norwegian foods to please her husband—and
made lefse for the first time with Charles’s family. Since she and
her husband had the family’s old range necessary for baking the flatbread,
their home became the center for lefse production before the Christmas holidays.
The old stove was fueled by wood, corn cobs, or coal, but corn cobs were
the preferred fuel for baking the fragile flatbread.

Surprisingly,
given the strength of this family tradition, Helen Crim did not learn to
make lefse in her family but between she and Mildred, they figured out how
to make them. In later years, a Mrs. Hove, a local Norwegian woman shared
many of her recipes with Helen. Rolling the flour, shortening, milk, and
salt dough (the recipe did not include potatoes, which are an ingredient
common only to certain parts of Norway) to the proper degree of thinness
took time to learn, as did baking the delicacy at the right temperature
and for the right amount of time, especially on that old range. In 1945
or 1946, Mildred, Helen, and in later years Ruby (Charles’s and Helen’s
oldest sister) started making lefse together, and they just kept on doing
it, starting what has become a family tradition.

When Jean was a child, the lefse-making sessions took place at her Aunt
Ruby’s because she had an electric griddle that was much easier to
use than the range which had long been replaced by an electric stove. Eventually,
the hand-made lefse rolling pin that did come through the family lines was
replaced by a purchased one. (At our present day Lefse Day, we have several
electric griddles and several lefse rolling pins in use at once!)

Regardless of how the lefse was baked, the basic ingredients stayed the
same. Mildred, the instigator of this whole process, liked the challenge
of learning to make lefse as well as what the family called potato cakes,
which were what most Iowans of Norwegian descent know as lefse. Potato cakes
were 10-12 inch rounds of baked and flexible flat bread made with mashed
potatoes mixed with a small amount of flour and spread with butter, jelly,
white or brown sugar and folded into quarters. The flour lefse recipe was
used to make a 12-18 inch, paper thin, cracker-like flatbread that kept
well and for as long as a year but needed to be moistened with damp dish
towels before it was spread with butter, brown and white sugar, folded,
and eaten. The size of both kinds of bread shifted, depending on the the
range or griddle used.

Not only did the Crim women make lefse at Christmas time, they also made
kringla for the occasion, as well as a large meal of turkey, dressing, gravy,
mashed potatoes, salad, vegetables, and pie. Jean, who was, as she notes,
one of a tag end of cousins, has fond memories of those days, and by the
time she was in junior high, she was allowed to help out with the lefse
and potato cake rolling and baking. In 2006, over thirty Crim family members
of all ages, some coming from as far as Ohio and Illinois, got together
at Jean’s house in Webster City on a Saturday in early December to
make batches of lefse, tell stories, and pass on the tradition to another
generation.